“Those who have come to us,” said Stephan, “have always been young.”
Gray struck his hands together.
“But it shouldn’t be that way!” he cried. “It should take all ages. It should show on the face and hands! Not one of you shows it on the face or hands. There should be a dark band across the forehead. The fingertips should be silver, and the fingers should be twisted and bent. . . . Have you ever seen a doctor?”
Stephan smiled grimly. “That”—he pointed again to Vladimir’s body—“when that was our master, he had a doctor to keep us alive. And there was never any doubt.”
“I was at Ellis Island,” said Gray excitedly. “I know what I’m talking——”
“It is finished,” said Stephan grimly. “We die. Go and send your soldiers or your people to kill us.”
“Cunningham, make him listen——”
“Go on, Gray,” said Cunningham hoarsely. His face was ashen. “They’d only put us in some—some horrible colony somewhere. I—I don’t want to live after this. If they want to die, let them. I’m going to stay and—and get killed with them, if I can.”
“Idiot!” snapped Gray. “I’ve been telling you for half an hour that the symptoms are all wrong. And I was on Ellis Island and I know what they have got! And I know how they got it. Why, you idiot, don’t you see that Vladimir was getting his father to send him slaves to work that damned mine? That the only way they could be kept as slaves would be to make them think they’d be killed if anybody else knew what he knew about them? They didn’t get that thing naturally. They were deliberately inoculated with psoriasis, a sub-tropical skin affection that looks enough like leprosy to give anybody a start, but doesn’t make a person unfit to work! These poor devils thought they were lepers, and they had a skin affection that is about as serious as dandruff! Creosote ointment or arsenic taken internally will cure it in ten days, and without one of those two things it lasts for years. Cooped up as they were, they reinfected each other. Believing themselves pariahs, they were afraid to run away from Vladimir until they had to. And he was trying to bluff them back to work in his mine. Don’t you see, you idiot? Don’t you see? It was a trick to get workers for his mine, workers who wouldn’t dare be disloyal to him. And when they had run away, why, he had to get them back or they might find out themselves what he’d done and tell where his mine was and about all the crimes he’s committed these twenty years back. Don’t you see, Cunningham, don’t you see?”
He turned to Stephan, who was staring at him incredulously.